Musings of a mom: Give to your heart’s content

Mom Insight of the Day:

If you start longing for appreciation for everything you do, it might be a sign that you are over-giving.

Let me explain, it will make sense in the end, I promise 🙂

When you give from your heart what you have in there, you have no need for being seen and appreciated, you give to your heart’s content. The giving itself is rewarding, so to speak. Not that it’s not nice to get a compliment now and then but you don’t collapse without them.

But when you start to over-give, you are giving away resources you actually needed for yourself to be in balance. A balance you need in order to be able to keep giving -things usually tend to get quite paradoxical in human life 😀 So for all that you give too much, you need something in return for the sake of harmony, and as humans we like getting appraisal in return, am I right?

Hence, if you’re craving to be appraised, you’re handing out too much of your goodies.

The balance might be off in many ways. It might be a job situation where you over-work or where your talents and your input are not cared about or asked for. You’re giving your goodies away time after time, too much for a company or institution that frankly doesn’t deserve you. So you start needing appreciation, you’re feeling undervalued, unseen or useless. No balance to be seen miles around. You might wanna fetch yourself another job where you can give to your heart’s content.

It might be an ego-situation where you give way too much in order to feed your ego, but not your soul. It’s the state of the soul that decides on your balance and your happiness. Do what truly makes you happy, the kind of happiness you can actually physically feel in your heart.

It might be a family situation, endlessly trying to please a mother or father who will never hand out the love asked for. Nurture yourself instead. Behind not being able to give love there’s always a sad story, better make your own story worth the while.

Or, in my case, it might be a classic mothering situation. Mothers tend to hand out heaping spoons of theirselves. You just love those munchkins sooooo much and they are sooooo adorable, how could you not give all there is and more? Stuff easily gets out of balance and then comes the day you find yourself screaming half-sobbing “I give SO much to you guys but when will anybody see that I have needs too?!” Or the like, fill in with your own idiosyncrasies.

Generally, the Family will look at you jaws dropped and a very surprised look in the eyes. They never see it coming 😀 Your balance is after all your responsibility.

Taking care of yourself in order to maintain the balance is and will always be the best way to give to yourself and others.

The munchkins are happier with a happy mom than with an incredibly healthy and festive breakfast that took you more than half an hour to prepare and style during the morning hurry. Yes I do crazy stuff like that, while I feel overflowing with love for my awesome offspring. They barely notice the culinary feast you put under their noses, and when you’re halfway to school it turns out they forgot to take their school bag and you can turn the car round and start stressing. Well you already were, so what’s the whole point anyway.

It’s not that I don’t know all this stuff, but moms will be moms and fall in that trap over and over again. It’s okay to be human 🤓. As long as we’re aware of our human condition, instead of drowning in it and forgetting to reach for the moon and all the undiscovered lands that lie beyond.

But for now, let’s get ourselves together, leave the house to the hubby and go for a swim, a hike, some shopping or whatever fills us up again.

See you around!

Nelly